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Ross Douthat has a thought-provoking article on declining birthrates. He argues that it is a sign of the decadence of modernity, summing up his case with a paragraph I confess I may need awhile to fully digest:

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Noah Smith replies on twitter that high birth rates were never about caring about the future of society, rather it was based on the need for more farm labor, a lack of birth control, and conformity. Like I said, I find Douthat's argument thought-provoking, but I'd like to hear him make the case what we're seeing is really an increase in selfishness instead of Noah's explanation.

But leaving aside whether the decline in childbirth says something positive or negative about us, what I find interesting is how the case for more babies fails to distinguish itself from the case for more immigrants. Here is Douthat making the argument for the former:

Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.

But of course immigrants also can be tomorrow's taxpayers, workers, and entrepreneurs; and they can keep the ratio of workers per retiree up as well. Even better, immigrants arrive here as workers and skip past the whole taking and not giving stage of childhood through adolescence. If you want to apply the conservative meme of makers vs takers most accurately then apply to adults and children. Having more babies may be economically positive, but surely if we could give birth to fully formed adults their net economic contribution would go up. And that is effectively what immigrants are: fully formed adults who enter our country ready to work without having required anything from us first, unlike those needy takers we call America's children.

To his credit, Douthat recognizes this:

America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).

Yet if immigrants have similar effects as having babies but with more positive net economic contribution, then why fuss about "Government's power over fertility", which Douthat recognizes is "limited, but not nonexistent"? Our power to increase immigration in contrast is both massive and cheap: all we have to do is stop getting in the way.

A final point I want to make is about low versus high-skilled labor. You don't read in Douthat's article any notion that we should be encouraging higher birthrates among those with more skills and ability. For some reason, people seem far more willing to believe that the net economic contribution of unskilled workers is positive if they are born in this country. Of course ability and skill are not perfectly hereditary, but neither are those who enter as low-skilled immigrants doomed to remain so. Additionally , unlike native low-skilled workers, low-skilled immigrants are likely to arrive with skills and abilities that are complimentary rather than competitive with the existing labor force, and they are much more mobile too.

My point isn't to criticize Douthat for failing to sufficiently argue for immigration, but rather to point out that our intuitions and beliefs about the economic benefits of babies apply fairly well to immigration, indeed for several reasons they apply even more.